p.r.bullen - travelogue

Despite it's reputation for industrial accidents after the Union Carbide disaster in the early 1980s, Bhopal turned out to be very pretty. Aingeal and I caught a sleeper down on Thursday night, getting in at a reasonable 8AM Friday morning, August 15th 1997, the 50th anniversary of India's independence. (We'd been to the Red Fort in Old Delhi for the early morning speeches the year before, as the Ambassador had had to be out of the country, but he was in Delhi this year, so we made our escape for a weekend away.) An auto-rickshaw ride across town to the hotel, a quick shower, and we were having breakfast by 10 AM. We hired a car for the trip to the Buddhist complex at Sanchi, with plans to visit two other places just beyond as well. I've put together a few photos from that side trip, as my first photo-travelogue. Hope you like them!

The trip to Sanchi only took a bit over an hour. In fact, we'd seen it from the train on the way into town, earlier, a large hill in the middle of a wide valley, with a large hemispherical building of some kind on the top: the main stupa. (The journey had been very good, in a first-class AC carriage as the 2-tier AC sleepers were full. Our 2-person compartment was apparently being used by a minister of state, from Bhopal to the far terminus in Chennai, Tamil Nadu.) That part of the country has a layered effect, as a flat-ish plane drops suddenly to a lower river plain, long fingers of mesa sticking out from the surrounding higher land into the wide valleys. The sense of being surrounded, at great distance, by low hills reminded me of the Ngorongoro crater.

The Great Stupa is enormous, the biggest I've seen, about 4 stories high, a giant hemisphere sticking up out of the ground. You almost imagine that the curve of the building continues around, down, to form a perfect sphere, but I suppose it doesn't. At the top is a little square fenced off area and a funny sort of antenna-like thing, a pole with three disks, each smaller than the last, as if it were receiving broadcasts from straight overhead. Not, by the way, like you can get up there! The stupas are solid stone, but do have/did have relics of the Buddha or great Buddhist holy men inside.

Around the outside is a high stone fence, with four giant gates (toranas), two stories high, at the cardinal points. The toranas are two stone pillars, two stories high, with three stone crossbars connecting the top parts. The toranas are entirely carved with scenes from the Buddha's life, though the Buddha himself is always shown as a Bo tree, an empty throne, a riderless horse. My favorite was a cross section with a Bo tree and angels & other happy seeming folk on the left side of arc, while the rest of the cross bar was full of fat angry dwarves apparently shouting or crying out, scowls furrowing the brows.

There were a huge number of other stupas, some quite big but none rivaling the Great Stupa. Some were very small, perfect for sitting on in the shade for a little rest from the heat, until a caretaker wandered over and said, no, that's a stupa too and no sitting on holy objects. There were a lot of trees, though, great wide shade trees all around the Great Stupa. We wandered down the hill to Stupa Number 2, past the giant water tank (oddly, nearly empty! what happened to the monsoon rains?), through groves of brambles and nettles, and scraggly bushes with little multicolored clusters of flowers (yellow flowers, oranges, pinks, each bunch different, a little pointillist burst of color). Climbing back up was very hot.

Then, we went on to the Udaigiri Caves and the Heliodorus Pillar, a few miles past Sanchi. The caves, on the top of a large isolated mesa, all had gates -- locked gates, so we couldn't go in. No matter. Getting there, the last 2 miles after the turnoff had tall trees on either side of the road, and a group of over 100 school children were walking to the caves, dressed up for Independence Day and singing no-doubt-patriotic songs. We climbed the stairs cut out of the rock to the top of the mesa and enjoyed the view -- the countryside was the greenest, most fertile I've seen here, but it is monsoon season -- and the isolation, nobody around and only the singing and chatter from the children as they walked drifting over the fields and up to us on the mesa.

On another couple of miles to one of the least known, least visited and, I think, oddest sight I've seen here: the Heliodorus Pillar, locally known as the Khamb Baba pillar. The pillar was set up by a Greek ambassador from a Indo-Bactrian (Indo-Greek) king in the Punjab on the occasion of his conversion to Hinduism in about 150BC. Alexander the Great got as far as India, it seems, and even as late as 150 BC the descendants of his armies still held sway in places. Makes you think of the Sean Connery movie, "The Man Who Would Be King"...

The plaque at the pillar said: "History of the Pillar: This column is locally called Khamb Baba and is worshipped especially by fishermen. It bears two inscriptions in Brahmi characters and Prakrit language. One of these inscriptions records that the column was set up as a Garuda pillar in honor of god Vasudeva (Vishnu) by Heliodoros, a Greek inhabitant of Taxila who and come to the court of Bhagabhadra, king of central India, as an ambassador from Antialcidas, an Indo-Bactrian king of the Punjab. Heliodoros had evidently adopted Hinduism as he has styled himself a Bhagavata, i.e., a follower of the Vaishnava sect. The approximate date of the column is 150 BC."

The next day, we spent all morning visiting some Irish nuns who worked at a school for mentally handicapped children (both residential and non-residential). Their order (they?) had founded the school in the 1950s. The two sisters were actually sisters, five years apart in age. The older, Sister Philomena, had come to India on the first available boat after the end of the war, in July 1947, and, like India itself, was celebrating a 50th anniversary. The younger, Sister Christopher, came over a few years later. They had been in Bhopal for most of their lives, and yet were so Irish after everything. Used to Indian ways, able to speak Hindi, etc. etc., of course, but still very Irish. They gave us a tour of the school, though only the resident children were there, and not all of them, due to the Independence celebrations and to another festival on the Monday 2 days later. The school was very impressive, and everyone was very nice. The woman who runs the school is another, younger, nun, an Indian, as the Irish sisters had wisely passed on the mantle while they themselves were still able to provide help and advice if needed (though it must be said, both they and the director all seemed quite able to do anything they set their minds to. I should be doing so well at 70!). After a nice lunch there, they kindly offered us the school van to take us to Bhimbetka, about an hour away.

Bhimbetka is a group of natural caves on a mesa. The caves, carved by wind and water over eons, were inhabited for millennia, and have cave paintings up to 10,000 years old (we were told). Certainly, very old indeed. Some caves even had three series of paintings, aged 10,000, 6,000 and 2,000 years. It was completely deserted, except for a few guides hanging around. (For once, the guides were essential: you'd never have noticed some of the paintings otherwise. That anything that old should have survived at all is mind-boggling. So, we headed on back to the school, had a nice cup of tea with the sisters, and then they drove us back to the hotel, with a detour to Union Carbide.

The old Union Carbide plant is deserted now, on the edge of town in a very poor district (not due to the disaster -- it was always a poor district). There was an ugly, but in some way powerful, memorial statue, of a woman holding a child running away from the factory. One of the sisters has a nasty hacking cough that she got from exposure to the gas in 1982. She said that the actual death toll was 22,000, not the 6,000 (cumulative) that is admitted by the government. Horrible, whichever number you believe.

The next day, we visited a couple of religious sites: the Birla Mandir and the big mosque, the Taj-ul-Masjid. The Birla Mandir overlooks the city, which is nearly bisected by two lakes. The lakes, and the surrounding hills, give the city a broken-up character that is very refreshing: it's not just one unending urban sprawl, but has some texture to it. In addition, the lakes and hills provide a bit of fresh air, and there are quite a few parks. Bhopal seems like a rather pleasant place (as long as you overlook the mosquitoes, due to the lake, that attack in droves...). The Taj-ul-Masjid was, well, like most mosques here, a large square plaza with a wall around it and a large domed prayer area on the side facing Mecca, but unlike the others the outer walls had rooms with entrances onto the courtyard. The rooms were being used for classes (religious, no doubt), as were the prayer areas at the head of the courtyard. Bhopal & environs have a very large Moslem population (I've been told that, before independence, there was talk of making it part of Pakistan, but I don't know if there's any truth to that.)

Then, back to the hotel, a quick bite, and an 8 hour train journey home on the luxury Shatabdi Express.